Examining Teachers’ Technology Use Through Digital Portfolios

Abstract

Digital portfolios designed by educators have the potential to serve as assertions of technology knowledge (TK). This study describes and begins to evaluate a proposed method for assessing educators’ asserted TK through the platforms and artifacts that comprise these portfolios. Using 589 digital teaching portfolios, we identify and analyze trends observed across the platform technology and report on the development of a coding frame for analyzing the artifacts contained within these portfolios. The results of this study provide some interesting clues as to the nature of educators’ technology knowledge; however, the primary utility of these results is as a foundation for future research. Researchers should build on and evaluate the information in this study to further explore the use of portfolios for examining asserted TK